A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the Quarterly to
the Sunday at Home. Grand tournaments are organised at chess,
draughts, billiards and whist. Once and again wandering artists
drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going
you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the
hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who
announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or
solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at
dinner-time with songs and a collection. They are all of them good
to see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the
sentiment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol,
and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk
still simmer in our mountain prison. Some of them, too, are
welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may
have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a
wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle
into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding
lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat
of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference
rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing
that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
true virtuoso.
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